Free Know Your Beholder: A Novel by Adam Rapp Page A

back,” I lied again. “But don’t worry, they’ll be shoveled and salted first thing tomorrow.”
    Then, without looking at my hands, she said, “Why are you holding that?”
    I hadn’t even realized it, but I’d removed their TiVo remote from the pocket of my bathrobe. I was squeezing it so hard my knuckles were pearling. I loosened my grip, handed it to her.
    She gently snatched it and wedged it into her armpit. “I think you should go,” she said, her arms folded in front of her, her chin still jutting.
    I found myself wondering how many times she’d fallen into the net while doing trapeze. Twelve? Two hundred? And would it have been a product of bad timing or a missed cue? Her body hurtling through the air as if thrown from the window of a high-speed train.
    The remote fell from her armpit to the floor, and the cover for the batteries popped off and one AA battery rolled across the space between us and kissed my slippered left foot. We froze in recognition of a kind of mushroom-cloud moment. Neither of us would look down.
    I realized I was squeezing my butt cheeks together with all my might, which I surmised was related to my acute dehydration. It somehow felt like the AA battery was now lodged in my rectum.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, hoarse now. “Next time I’ll make sure someone’s home.”
    She uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again.
    Then I bent down, which allowed me to release my butt cheeks, engaged my unfit, atrophying hamstrings, and grabbed the remote, its small plastic battery cover, and the battery. On one knee I negotiated the battery into its correct plus-minus position, clicked the case closed, and rose to hand Mary Bunch the remote, which she accepted with cupped, rigid hands, as if being forced to inherit a piece of unwanted heirloom crystal.
    Up close she had soft, perfect skin, and despite her mucoidal nostrils, her breath smelled like maple syrup and pancakes.
      
    Later in my room I took a Viagra. Earlier I’d procured a vial of the little blue rhomboidal pellets from my pot dealer, Haggis, who, in addition to the popular erectile dysfunction pill, is now selling Vicodin, Xanax, and chocolate bars infused with psychedelic mushrooms. It seems that when it comes to matters of small-town drug dealing, expansion is more than possible, even during a recession.
    Despite the blizzard, Haggis wore frayed corduroy cutoffs and hiking boots with no socks. I could smell his feet. Oddly buttery, deeply fungal. Like multiplex popcorn and the between-the-toes cheese of masculine decomposition.
    Haggis lives out of his car—a venom-yellow midnineties Nissan hatchback that boasts a suspicious-looking Nevada license plate and many dings and dents. He’d recently fashioned ghetto-style valance curtains from what appears to be the felt hide of a pool table, which he uses to conceal his front and back windshields and all windows. He’s one of those post-post-post-college-aged eccentrics who spring for custom curtains but won’t fix the dents on their car.
    Haggis came up to the attic, and after completing the Viagra transaction, we drank instant Folgers and listened to side A of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours .
    Inspired by his shorts, I offered him my corduroy reading chair. I manned my twin bed, which sort of sags in the middle.
    Our hands were interlaced around kooky gift-store mugs. Mine had a snoozing Garfield the cat on it, the phrase “Anybody can exercise…but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline” splitting at the ellipse, ringing either side of the rim. Haggis’s mug featured the words BEST WIFE IN THE LAND OF LINCOLN in large red letters, which were superimposed over the silhouette of our great sixteenth president’s profile, the profile framed by a cookie-cutter outline of our twenty-first state. A joke gift from Sheila Anne. Given that I am the one who was technically cuckolded, wife now carries with it an ugly, stomach-turning connotation, yet I keep the mug around the